


When We Were Both

by karanguni



Category: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: OGC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-05
Updated: 2009-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 23:59:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Such things they were made and made to do, when they were both young.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When We Were Both

'You're a long way from the city.'

It was, after all this time, still his voice.

There wasn't enough space to think around that thought. No space to consider the absolute, iridescent whiteness of his hair that passed over his shoulders in a rambling tangle of strands. He still wore his uniform. Black; made of reinforced material made from a combination of twisted molecules. White spilling over black.

Tseng did not think those thoughts; they occurred in passing. Entire moments of perceived reality that throbbed themselves in time with his breathing. His systole. His diastole. From where he was, Tseng could see the greens of Sephiroth's eyes. He was given a moment to breathe. It invited a response.

'Yes,' Tseng rasped. His throat was very wet with blood. Very slowly he raised his hands and touched the length of _Masamune_ where it entered his chest. Sephiroth's blade did not move. Sephiroth himself did not quiver.

'Are you here to stop me?' Sephiroth's hands were on the hilt of the sword. Black gloves. With his years of practice there was no question of hesitation. How very many years. Tseng closed his eyes upon seeing Sephiroth brace his frame and tense. In the private, moist darkness of his thoughts, Tseng remembered silver hair, black uniforms, and a time when Sephiroth was younger than he was. Not yet metamorphosed. The same as Tseng had been.

'You're not going to stop me,' said Sephiroth calmly. He was not rushing. Tseng's cold fingers felt every incremental millimetre of _Masamune_ 's movement through his abdomen. He cried aloud so that he could move his tongue instead of biting it in half from the pain.

He was freezing. His teeth chattered when Sephiroth stopped pushing. Enamel crashed repeatedly against enamel. It took Tseng awhile to find the words. 'I can't stop you,' he said to Sephiroth.

Sephiroth tilted his head. He stood directly in front of Tseng. He had long white hair over a black, black uniform. 'Did the President order you here?' he asked. He stood very still. As still as Tseng lay. 'Did you come here obediently, Turk?'

'Yes,' Tseng said on an exhale. He pushed his lolling head up against the wall of the Temple so that he could watch Sephiroth's eyes. A slow rage was creeping into Sephiroth's irises. The blade was pushed deeper. Yes. Yes. Tseng could feel it, the metal.

He was still alive.

'Tseng,' Sephiroth said his name. His voice was still, after all this time, his voice. 'You have been a Turk for a very long time.' Tseng had heard this voice on missions. In meetings. Mixed in with his own. 'How long?'

Very long. Tseng looked up into Sephiroth's unchangingly serene face. Tseng'd been a Turk long enough to have memorised this face. Shinra's General. Their General. Tseng reached out his arm, his heavy, dripping sleeve slapping a wet noise along the honed edge of _Masamune_. His fingers, numb and twitching, grazed the hilt and the smooth edge of Sephiroth's glove. 'I've been a Turk for as long as I can remember,' Tseng gasped, leaning forward.

The cut through him was clean, beautifully clean, and self-staunching. He was still alive. His hair spilled over his shoulders as his body weighted him down. Black. His hair was black. 'I've been a Turk as long,' Tseng gasped, his eyes wildly in focus as he gazed helplessly at Sephiroth's blooded and booted feet, 'as long as you've been a SOLDIER.' His senses quietly overloaded, one by one by one by one by one.

Sephiroth did not move. He had always been conservative with his strength. Unnaturally still. Tseng had wondered, with envy, with selfish relief, whether that stillness could be inbred. Whether Sephiroth's lack of expression, the immobility that Tseng worked slow half-decades to attain, was innately present by virtue of superior genetics.

A wind was blowing. Tseng shook. Strands of silver brushed his forearm and flank. _Blanche._ Sephiroth pushed his hair out of the way before it could stain red. 'We know each other,' Sephiroth murmured down to Tseng, a smile on his face and in his voice.

'I know you don't smile,' Tseng said, lifting his head with agonising slowness.

A gloved hand settled on Tseng's shaking shoulder. 'I know you have no Mako infusions in your blood.'

'Yes,' Tseng hissed. Bile rose up his throat. He swallowed, and it burned a route back down his oesophagus. Human reactions to human pain. 'I was jealous,' Tseng said, abruptly. There was no space for a smooth ordering of thoughts. No time left; all their time was in the past. Wars. Worlds that were expanding.

'Of Mother?' Sephiroth asked, pulling on Tseng and pulling him closer. 'I don't feel her,' Sephiroth said as Tseng's body crawled its way along _Masamune_ 's length. 'I don't smell her in you.'

'You wouldn't,' Tseng gasped, gripping the hilt of the sword with all his strength to give him something else to _think_ about other than what had changed and the person in front of him that he did not know and the bright white searing blinding light at the edges of his vision, the bright white of Sephiroth's hair puffing against his breath and the dark black of Sephiroth's gloves against his own bare fingers Tseng could barely breathe. Breathe. He whimpered against Sephiroth's shoulders, but he did not wish for it to end, nor to keep on living. He was still alive. In the present. In the progressive. His throat ached to moved. A scream turned into something else. 'Veld never let me,' Tseng whispered, forcing each syllable into precision and one long, coherent scream. 'Not me or any of us. Hojo -'

Sephiroth smiled, again.

'- Hojo wanted. But by then I was -' Tseng closed his eyes, blinked away the memory of Sephiroth's first day in Midgar, when the tar was new, ' - by then I was old. And you were young. As old as I was.'

Sephiroth was something else entirely. Nothing human, except for the way he had led their men through the old country, through Wutai. Shinra had stood behind his banner as though it was a beacon for the new world, for Midgar. Where it didn't matter where you were made, or _if_ you were made. Hojo had created Sephiroth, perfect and impossible and utterly alone. Hojo had needed nothing else, after Sephiroth.

'The Professor wanted to make you,' Sephiroth said, his voice smooth as undisturbed water, 'one of us.'

'Yes,' Tseng said.

'One of my brothers,' Sephiroth said, with awakening pleasure. The grip on Tseng's shoulder lessened. Sephiroth's hand moved instead to Tseng's back.

'We were already allies,' Tseng said, his eyes stuttering shut as Sephiroth's fingers traced his exit wound. He could feel Sephiroth gently cup the lower edge of _Masamune_ 's blade. His body lay draped between Sephiroth's hands. 'I was already Shinra's. I was trained. Young as you were young, and he made me -' Tseng ran out of breath.

'What,' came Sephiroth's quiet, smiling question against his ear, 'did he make you do?'

'I can't -' Tseng said, throat seizing. He would have, if he were Sephiroth, and didn't have limits.

'You're human,' Sephiroth observed. Tseng was too dizzy to see, but he could feel Sephiroth shift. 'Truly, completely human.' And the sound of leather. And the hum of materia. And the warmth of green, green magic.

Tseng seized upon _Masamune_ 's length. ' _No,_ ' he croaked, but Sephiroth's hand was warm against his belly, and his fingers were spread like brands of heat as the Cure funnelled itself into Tseng's body. ' _No_ ,' Tseng gurgled around the pain. His mouth opened and his hearing sharpened to a whine as he screamed around the feel of his body healing around Sephiroth's blade, wounds trying to close over metal and tissue forming persistently against iron.

By the time the spell was done, both of Tseng's hands were on Sephiroth's shoulders, and he could have begged. There was salt down his cheeks.

'Any other human would have passed out,' Sephiroth said, removing his hand. The pain was gone, but returning. Every moment that passed without the effects of the Cure materia allowed the wound to reopen, but now without the benefit of the merciful speed of force. 'Speak quickly. What did the Professor make you do, Turk?'

'Do you remember Veld?' Tseng asked, blinking rapidly. He forced himself to let go of Sephiroth. Stay awake. Stay awake. 'Can you remember Veld?'

'Mother tells me that he was a Turk, too,' Sephiroth murmured. 'He was someone important.' Without warning, Sephiroth shifted his grip on his blade. Tseng threw his head back, and almost bit clean through his lip as he was jerked upwards. 'Why is he important?'

'In the initial,' Tseng cried out quietly, 'in the initial phases,' he panted, coming down from the spike of pain, 'initial phases of the SOLDIER programme -'

'Before I was born?'

' - after. I wasn't old enough to remember when you were born.' Tseng dug his fingers into his thigh. An alternate, quieter source of pain. A focal point for concentration. 'In those phases, we were tasked to find - specimens. Volunteers for the SOLDIER corps.'

'My brothers,' Sephiroth said, pleased. He raised Tseng's chin with the back of his hand. 'My very weak brothers.'

'There were no volunteers at that stage,' Tseng said, his jaw chattering. 'The only other plausible candidates - in Hojo's eyes - were the Turks. He wanted us -'

'You would have made a fine sibling.' Sephiroth stroked Tseng's fringe out of his face. 'The Professor wanted _you_.'

'Veld made an agreement with Hojo,' Tseng said. 'Those Turks who could not pass the bar we would send - to -' Tseng grabbed at Sephiroth's hand. 'Don't. I can't. Concentrate.'

Sephiroth lowered _Masamune_ enough that Tseng's knees grazed the ground. Tseng's spine flexed with relief from the pressure. 'Whom did you send, and why? Mother wants to know.'

'There were conditions,' Tseng groaned. He could not take all of his own weight. He fisted a hand on Sephiroth's chest. Sephiroth, again, did not move. 'The War was being fought. You were still - you don't remember this at all.'

'No,' Sephiroth said without inflection. 'I do not remember very much about Shinra. Mother does not want me to. I think I do not want to either.'

'In Wutai,' Tseng said. The War that had gone on for forever. The War for Mako, and dominance. Shinra's War, Midgar's War, the War against Wutai. Tseng did not remember much of the War that he did not have to. He belong to and with Shinra; Shinra hadn't needed him to remember and he did not want -- 'In Wutai there were missions.' Tseng shifted himself and stifled a sound. 'No one is truly from Midgar. Turks hire off the streets. Veld tested loyalties.'

'I see you passed,' Sephiroth said, without emotion.

'Others did not.' Tseng pushed the sweat out of his eyes with his free hand. He tightened his hold on Sephiroth with his other. Tseng was nauseous from memory and reality. 'You were made to be perfect.'

'Mother made me perfect,' Sephiroth said.

'Hojo needed to refine you,' Tseng said, voice dropping.

'Mother wanted us all to reunite,' Sephiroth said.

'He didn't risk you on prototypical experiments,' Tseng went on.

'My brothers,' Sephiroth said.

'My colleagues,' Tseng quipped, with a quirk of his lips: a grimace. 'In exchange for the rest of us -'

'He made you watch,' Sephiroth said.

'When it was complete,' Tseng said. 'When you and I were both young, he made me watch when he put you through your first treatments. Do you remember?' Sephiroth did not move. Tseng's fist trembled against Sephiroth's chest. His fingernails dug into the flesh of his palms. The world spun on its axis. Systole. Diastole. Each breath hurt. 'It kept your hair white,' Tseng laughed in concentrated bursts. He looked into Sephiroth's irises; distorted into cat's eyes and green, inhuman, unfamiliar. 'And it kept my eyes black.'

There was a moment of nothing but breathing; no space for anything else; no space for the past or thoughts of the future.

'You are not related to me,' Sephiroth surmised with a note of finality. He stepped back. Tseng's body, drawn like a doll on string, followed the path of _Masamune_ 's unerring edge. Sephiroth's footsteps were reddened and sticky. 'You will not be at the Reunion.'

The sword dragged itself out of Tseng, like poison and the fading presence of dead allies. The Temple's foundations quaked. The world was narrowing and changing.

'Do you wish to live or die?' he heard Sephiroth say, in a voice that, after all this time, was still Sephiroth's own.

'Neither.' Tseng collapsed against the Temple's wall, an arm around the gaping wound in his stomach. There was space for one thought only: a nightmare is nothing, nothing more than an inversion of the familiar, the known. With darkness edging his vision, Tseng gazed through the fog at the white, bright image of Sephiroth before him. With his tongue thick in his mouth, he said, 'I simply survive.'

Sephiroth may have smiled, but Tseng was only sure of his shadow lengthening as the General walked away.


End file.
